Follow PR Daily on:

52 cool facts and stats about social media (2012 edition)

In July 2010, I wrote a post called "52 Cool Facts About Social Media" to explore some of the mind-boggling and truly impressive numbers from the space in which we play.
I also wanted to offer a fun fact for every week of the year, for anyone playing social media trivia games.
At the time, the Big Five were (arguably) Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and blogging. My, what a difference two years make.
So, to bring some of these figures up to date, as well as include some of the newer names on the scene, here are 52 cool facts about social media, the 2012 edition.
Facebook

1.
85 percent of women are annoyed by their friends (note—I don't think this is just limited to Facebook!)
2.
Links about sex are shared 90 percent more than any other link.
3.
More than 350 million users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome.
4.
25 percent of users don't bother with any kind of privacy control.
5.
The average Facebook user has 130 friends.

Statistics from Economist, Social Times, CNN.

Twitter

6.
750 tweets per second are shared on Twitter.
7.
The original Twitter beta was launched on the birthday of CEO Evan Williams.
8. If Twitter was a country, it'd be the 12th largest in the world.
9.
30percent of Twitter users have an income of more than $100,000.
10. Twitter handles more search queries per month than Bing and Yahoo combined (24 billion versus 4.1 billion and 9.4 billion respectively).

Statistics from Compete, Twitter Press Centre and BNN News.

LinkedIn

11.
Two new members sign up to LinkedIn every second.
12.
LinkedIn has 161 million members in more than 200 countries and communities.
13.
Members are on track to make more than 5.3 billion searches on the platform in 2012.
14.
LinkedIn's revenue has doubled every quarter for the last two years.
15.
There are more than 1 million LinkedIn groups.

Statistics from LinkedIn Press Centre.

YouTube

16.
YouTube was founded to share dinner clips of a party due to the files being too large for email.
17.
The most watched video is Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance," with 470 million views.
18.
The most watched non-commercial video is "Charlie Bit My Finger Again," with more than 458 million views.
19. The average visitor spends 15 minutes per day on YouTube.
20.
It originally started life as a dating site and was influenced by the Hot Or Not website.

Statistics: Techzine and YouTube Archives.

Blogging

21. 3 million new blogs come online every month.
22. 60 percent of bloggers are between 25 to 44 years old.
23. 20 percent of bloggers have been blogging for more than six years.
24.
Professional bloggers maintain an average of four blogs.
25. 35 percent of corporate bloggers worked in a journalism, media or professional writing role.

Statistics: Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2011.

Pinterest

26.
Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.
27.
Users spend an average of just fewer than 16 minutes on the site.
28.
The most popular age group is 25-34 year olds, accounting for 27.4 percent of the user base.
29.
Pinterest receives 1.3 million visitors per day.
30.
97 percent of the fans of Pinterest's Facebook page are women.

Statistics: Modea

Instagram

31.
25 percent of Instagram users upload more than three pictures.
32.
More than 5 million images are uploaded every day.
33.
President Obama is on Instagram, having joined in January 2012.
34. Earlybird is the most popular filter, with 12.5 percent users preferring it (zero filters is the most popular way to use Instagram, with more than 47
percent of users going au naturel).
35.
There are 575 likes per second.

36.
"Student" is the number one occupation of Google+ users.
37. More than 2/3 of its users are male.
38. The Google +1 button is used more than five billion times per day.
39. Google+ is adding 625,000 new users every day.
40. More than 42 percent of Google+ users are single.

Statistics: Google Blog, Techcrunch, Google Investor Reports.

Social media influence platforms

41. Klout has 50 times more traffic than PeerIndex, its closest competitor.
42. Kred tries to measure offline influence by allowing you to add achievements away from your online activities.
43. Klout changed its privacy model to allow opt-out from its service after a negative backlash in 2011.
44. Empire Avenue has users in more than 150 countries.
45.
Justin Bieber is the only person with a perfect Klout score of 100 (says it all, then).

Statistics: Social Media Today, The Next Web.

The mobile Web

46.
42 percent of phones in the U.S. are smartphones, with 44 percent of European users using smartphones.
47.
More than 110 million smartphone users in the U.S and Europe access social networks and blogs on their phones.
48.
Tablets took just two years to reach 40 million users in the U.S. It took smartphones seven years to reach this figure.
49.
China is the No. 1 country in the world for smartphone use, with approximately 1 billion users.
50.
In the U.K., there are twice as many smartphone users than cigarette smokers.

Statistics: ComScore and SoMobile.

Bonus facts

51. Social gamers are expected to buy $6 billion in virtual goods in 2012.
52.
One in five couples meet online; three in five gay couples meet online.

Statistics: eMarketer and Stanford University.

So there you have it. The updated 2012 edition of 52 cool facts about social media, offers a nugget for every week of the year.